My Secret Life, by "Walter", is the memoir of a gentleman describing the author's sexual development and experiences in Victorian England. It was first published in a private edition of eleven volumes, which appeared over seven years beginning around 1888.
The work itself is enormous, amounting to over one million words, the eleven original volumes amounting to over 4,000 pages. The text is repetitive and highly disorganised,
but its frank discussion of sexual matters and other hidden aspects of
Victorian life make it a rare and valuable social document. It has been
described as "one of the strangest and most obsessive books ever
written".

Publishing, and bans

The first edition was probably printed by Auguste Brancart,in an impression of only 25 copies.
In the twentieth century My Secret Life was pirated and
reprinted in a number of abridged versions that were frequently
suppressed for obscenity. In 1932, for example, a New York publisher was arrested for issuing the first three volumes.
In the USA it was finally published without censorship in 1966 by Grove Press,
but in 1969 a British printer, Arthur Dobson, was sentenced to two
years' prison for producing a UK reprint. It was not until 1995 that the
work in its entirety was published openly in the UK, by Arrow Books.

Authorship

The true identity of "Walter" is not known for certain.
The most commonly suggested author is Henry Spencer Ashbee
(21 April 1834 – 29 July 1900). He was a book collector, writer, and
bibliographer and notable as an early authority on erotic literature. Gershon Legman
was the first to link "Walter" and Ashbee, in his introduction to the
1962 reprints of Ashbee's bibliographies, and the 1966 Grove Press
edition of My Secret Life included an expanded version of that essay. Ashbee was also picked as the Walter by a May 2000, Channel 4 documentary on British TV, Walter: The Secret Life of a Victorian Pornographer - and in 2001 Ian Gibson's The Erotomaniac: the secret life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001, ISBN 0-571-19619-5) provided a detailed review of circumstantial evidence arguing that Ashbee wrote My Secret Life,
presumably weaving fantasy and anecdotes from friends in with his own
real-life experiences. If Ashbee was not the actual author, it is
suggested that he may well have been the compiler of the work's lengthy,
detailed index, and have provided other editorial assistance and help
in getting the book into print.
On the other hand, Steven Marcus, in his influential The Other Victorians
(1966), concluded that the balance of known facts was against Legman's
"shrewd and ingenious guess." Also unconvinced were Phyllis and Eberhard
Kronhausen in their detailed study of My Secret Life, Walter the English Casanova (1967).
A number of other men have been suggested as more likely to be the author, including:

William Simpson Potter,
a known associate of Ashbee, was put forward by Gordon Grimley in his
introduction to the 1972 edition of "My Secret Life". Grimley is
sceptical of Ashbee's candidacy as the main author. According to Ashbee,
Potter was involved in authoring The Romance of Lust, an erotic work centred on incest and a range of sexual encounters.

Charles Stanley, a barrister and stockbroker, was put forward in 2000 by Vern Bullough and Gordon Stein,
who wrote that he was the best alternative candidate if not Ashbee was
not Walter - and that the evidence slightly favored Stanley. The
strongest evidence for this theory was that "Walter" claimed to be a
close friend of the barrister in a famous case of the time, which
appears to be the case R v Richard Clarke of 1854. That barrister,
William Overend QC, was a childhood friend of Stanley.

William Haywood
(1821-1894), who was Surveyor and Engineer to the City of London
Commissioners of Sewers was suggested by John Patrick Pattinson in 2002
after extensive research.

Fact or fiction?

The
question of how much the book is a record of true experiences (whether
of Ashbee or another writer), and how much is fiction or erotic fantasy
can probably never be fully resolved. However, the presence of much
mundane detail, the writer's inclusion of incidents that do him little
personal credit, and the lack of intrinsically improbable circumstances
(in contrast to most Victorian erotica) lend it considerable
credibility. In spite of "Walter's" obsessive womanising over a period
of several decades, only a few of his partners are of his own social
class. The great majority are either prostitutes, servants or working
class women. This would appear to reflect the realities of his time.
Internal evidence from the book suggests that "Walter" was born between
1820 and 1825. In the last volume he notes seeing the books through
print, which indicates that he was still alive in the 1890s.